I’ve been enthusiastically telling everyone about this shirt and instead of them being impressed or amazed, they laugh and look at me like I’m crazy. And then I look at them like they’re crazy. How can they not be amazed? My shirt is a call for celebration! It’s a goddamned tribute to human accomplishment!

Mom – “It’s going to walk off without you in it.”

Me – “But it’s amazing!”

It’s not just a regular shirt. It’s a state of the art, technologically advanced, secret organic fillion-made super shirt and I’m apparently the only person in the word in awe of it.

Me and Mollie were giving a four-handed massage to one of our old faithful member clients.

Me – “You want to hear something cool?”

Client – “What?”

Me – “I’ve been wearing this shirt everyday for the last two weeks!”

They both crack up in hysterics.

Mollie – “Why would you bring that up now?” She said in-between gasps of laughter. “Oh my god Melanie.” It looked like she was crossing her legs trying not to pee.

***************************

It’s now November 26th. A week or two after starting this post. I’ve been wearing this t-shirt for at least 21 days now. I ordered another just like it and a long-sleeve shirt too. Knowing me, I’d make these shirts my official wardrobe. Three lonely shirts hanging in my closet next to an array of hoodies that amazingly enough, also never get dirty.

Okay, enough about my shirts. Let’s focus on me for a change. The girl inside the shirt.

I’m exhausted and cranky (what else is new?). I fired one of my new hires because she was beginning to piss me off. It’s not worth the effort writing about it, I’m just glad she’s gone. She was a flippin’ loony toon.

My new male therapist is great, clients love him, my co-workers love him, but he’s a close talker. Whenever I ask him a simple question, he mounts his face right up to my own and proceeds to answer my question with his awful breath. I swear I’m not embellishing any of this – it’s so absurd that it’s comical, but not comical while it’s happening. Just the way he walks over to me, to get so close to me – shoulder to shoulder. It’s like his breath is his way of saying “fuck you” to me.

He was talking to me one day while I was busy and/or just wanted quiet thinking time and I got up and hid in a massage room where I carried out playing on my iPhone. I felt guilty as fuck, but I’m at my wit’s end. The more therapists I have, the more I have to over-see, and I’m still massaging a great deal of people. If I stop to talk to someone, I forget what I was doing or what I have to do. There’s always something I forgot to do. So I get short with my therapists and even with my clients sometime.

( I just remembered I have to email a client!)

I’m so tired and it’s only 5:30 at night. My co-workers client didn’t show up today so I passed my client on to her. This is my first night of relaxation in a long time. Thanksgiving wasn’t relaxing so that doesn’t count. I was supposed to go over to my friends house after dinner but that didn’t happen, I’m supposed to go to a friends house tonight but that’s not happening either. I’m too miserable. Too bitchy. Nobody should ever see me like this. I can’t move anyway.

This is why I can’t massage anymore – I’m incapable of fake smiling, always have been. I’m incapable of anything fake. That’s why I come off as a cranky bitch. Either I’m a cranzy (accidentally mixed crazy with cranky) bitch or a non-personality, blank empty eyed person. Completely hollow. Wilted and beaten. It’s literally bad for my business to continue like this. It’s bad for life.

I miss myself.

My bank account on the 19th of this month was around $9,921 if my memory serves correctly, but it doesn’t matter what it was. This month I spent a gargantuan amount of money on furnishing the new massage room. $600 alone just on the carpet, $300 at home depot, $150 at Pier One, $300 at Ikea, $175 for the security deposit. Then I bought the Playstation VR for $530, renewed my massage insurance for $250, paid $700 in quarterly taxes, $800 on a marketing stunt (which I’ll make back), several more hundred on random Amazon buys. And I’m finishing the month with paying off my Sears bill of $1600.

But here’s the thing….the new massage room is completed. I have therapists on the schedule, ready to take clients. These two things mean that I can really let loose with selling those Signature couple’s massages on Groupon. We’ll be able to keep up even with a massive flood of them. My debt is seeing it’s last and final days. I’m roughly $31,000 in the hole.

This is it. The only thing I have to be careful of is that my therapists get paid 3 times instead of 2 next month. Normally I’d be shitting bricks due to this fact, but since those couple’s massages are selling like hot cakes, and it being December (the most lucrative time of year), I can actually get away with paying my therapists 3 times and paying a little extra towards my debt.

If I can pay it all off by April 1st, good, that’s great. That would make it exactly one year of my life I spent paying off $50,000 of debt. But it’s more likely to happen in June. If I pay it all off by June, that makes my cross-country trip difficult and highly improbable. I’d be cutting my trip really close to fall. And I’ll be traveling on a mo-ped, carrying the least amount of warm clothing as possible.

But I have to do this. I HAVE to take this stupid trip. I can’t wait for another year to revolve.

If my debt is paid off by June, I quit massaging and hire a receptionist. This might be an impecunious, tumultuous time if I don’t play my cards right. To leave the business for nearly a month after such an abrupt change in finances to literally go “joy riding” might be a bad idea.

But knowing me, I’d take that risk. I’d live on spam and sleep outside on park benches. Anything to make it happen. It’s really, the only thing I have to look forward to. It’s either eat spam and sleep on a park bench, or give up and just die already.

That’s a glimpse of just how sick and tired I am. Eating spam on a park bench sounds amazing.

I can’t write anymore. Writing, I think, is still the only thing I really strive for.

If only you were in my shoe’s, you’d know I don’t have the capacity for anything right now.

I sincerely hate massaging people, hate waking up early to have to massage a string of people. Keeping up with phones, laundry, emails, messes, schedules, annoying therapists, paperwork, payroll, angrily hanging up on telemarketers. Then having the general malaise of worry. Thinking that I forgot to do something. Take out the trash, clean the bathrooms….

Annoying therapists who invade my personal space to ask me how my thanksgiving was while I can vividly smell his dinner from last night being broken down by stomach acids.

My other therapist telling me her son is sick and she doesn’t know if she can work tomorrow.